The Bonzo Dog Doo-Dah Band's Tadpoles (1969) is...oh wait, very few people in my audience may know who the Bonzo Dog Doo-Dah Band were.
Seven (later six) art students with a shared love of comedy, music, and post-modern philosophy who piled piano and horns, frivolous arrangements, and absurd lyrics on top of each other to create sounds of insanity. The pianist, Neil Innes, played Sir Robin's Minstrel and co-wrote many songs with Eric Idle and Monty Python after the Bonzos split up, including the soundtrack to The Rutles and "Always Look on the Bright Side of Life." The vocalist, Vivian Stanshall, is still hailed as one of the great unsung heroes of British humor, one who died with much potential unrealized. They came to America once, jammed with Hendrix, and played a show-stopping Fillmore East concert involving tap-dancing, male stripteases, and robots blowing bubbles while singing "I'm Forever..."
Tadpoles, a collection of songs from their own pre-Flying Circus show Do Not Adjust Your Set, is one of those rare comedy albums where everything just fits RIGHT. Yankovic's records always have a misstep or two, a false note where the joke or the parody or the delivery don't come off. Here, everything is great. Dixieland pastiches, old music-hall numbers pushed to the brink of LSD-style brain-frying, the doo-wop hilarity "Canyons of Your Mind," Stanshall croonig "By a Waterfall" one moment and urging the listeners of "Mr. Apollo" to go wrestle some poodles the next, songs played on electric shirt hanger, rare B-sides later covered by Yo La Tengo ("Readymades"), and "I'm the Urban Spaceman," a track produced by Paul McCartney which somehow hit #5 on the British charts and sounds like a bona fide pop hit apart from the lyrics...it's all here! Whatever "it" is.
My Morning Jacket has an "It" even trickier to define: the titular concern of It Still Moves (2003), one of the greatest albums of the young century/millennium. Though divided into ten distinct songs, from the barn-burning "Dancefloors" to the poetically wandering "I Will Sing You Songs" to the gorgeous "Just One Thing" (the song which made me an MMJ fan after hearing at at 12:45 a.m. over the B&N loudspeakers after a long day...thank you, Mr. Clemens), it sounds like a single 72-minute rock 'n' roll symphony, an Ian Anderson dream, each movement flowing together on Jim James and Johnny Quaid's soaring, weeping, twanging, crunching, always lyrical guitars. Of those ten songs, nine include the word "it" in the lyrics, and "it" is never specifically defined. It may be vaguely judged to be a "masterplan" (another titular highlight) or such, but usually refers to some state of being, an emotion with much history and experience to anchor it, which vocalist James cannot escape from. The only song which leave out "it" is "Early Morning Rebel," an earnest plea for love as the anchor for idealism...this was the heart of the Bush era, after all, and right before we started to lose hope. Judging what precisely "it" is may be a matter left for the disciples of the New Criticism, but the record's roots in the past, in passions and pains which carry on, are enough to suffuse it with the weapons of emotional effect.
My worry after seeing the trailer for Peter Jackson's The Lovely Bones is that he may inordinately emphasize the obession Jack has with the killer (an unrecognizable Stanley Tucci) and play down the domestic struggles which give the book its greatest weight. Otherwise, Bones looks even better than the underrated King Kong...so we are thus in LOTR territory. Freed from a need to pay homage, Jackson's visuals reach new, sensuous levels of stimulation, the cast is excellent (Saorise Ronan looks PERFECT as Susie), and the glimpse I heard of Brian Eno's score sounds suitably epic. And besides, if Jackson, Frances Walsh, and Philippa Boyens can't adapt a book for the screen...nobody can. www.apple.com/trailers
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